John S. Shannon Distinguished Professor of Law
Professor of Psychology and Psychiatric MedicinePh.D., Indiana University, 1972B.A., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1968

John Monahan, a psychologist, joined the Law School faculty in 1980. He currently holds the John S. Shannon Distinguished Professorship in Law. He is the former Horace W. Goldsmith Research Professor of Law.

Monahan was elected a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 1989, and has served on the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Research Council. He was elected a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He also has been a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, New York University School of Law, the American Academy in Rome, All Souls College and Oxford. In 1997, he received an honorary law degree from the City University of New York.

Since 1986, Monahan has directed two large research projects in the area of mental health law. These projects, on which Virginia Law Professor Richard Bonnie has also served, have been supported by grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Monahan is the author or editor of 15 books and has written more than 200 articles and chapters. One of those books, Social Science in Law, co-authored by Larry Walker, is entering its seventh edition and has just been published in Chinese. Two of his other books won the Manfred Guttmacher Award of the American Psychiatric Association for outstanding research in law and psychiatry: The Clinical Prediction of Violent Behavior in 1982 and (with others) Rethinking Risk Assessment in 2002. His articles have been published in the Yale Law Journal and the Virginia, University of Pennsylvania, California, Iowa, and Southern California law reviews.

Monahan’s work has been cited frequently by courts, including the California Supreme Court in the landmark Tarasoff v. Regents and the U.S. Supreme Court in Barefoot v. Estelle, in which he was referred to as "the leading thinker on the issue" of violence risk assessment.